The Rats are Communing
November 2024
Hello, my fellow rats!
It’s me again, crawling back into your inboxes.
If your reaction is–be gone, vile vermin, you abandoned me 😤! Yes, understood. And I am sorry. But if your reaction is glee at my return…that also works! I’ve missed you regardless 😌
You might be wondering why, after 8 months, I’ve decided that this was the right time to come out of my burrow. Though not planned before today, it’s certainly intentional. I’ve spent the last several months learning, loving, grieving, scurrying, and—believe it or not, considering I wasn’t writing 🤡— thinking of you. It made this little heart soar when I got messages from you about events you attended and connections you made from Ratplay. Los Angeles is full of incredibly creative people with beautiful ideas and people eager to embrace them, and I wanted to help the connections between them happen just a little bit easier.
But as much as I loved being able to share events with you, the truth is, I didn’t love compiling them. It involved a lot of scrolling IG, and as someone who, like many of you, is preoccupied with being more careful with my own attention, it often felt that the way to get you outside and off your phones involved me doing, well…the opposite.
What really put a pause on these emails, however, was a realization that I was actually interested in cultivating a different type of connection than the ones often formed at one-off events–less ephemeral ones. I want to help people create connections that last 🔗. The type of connections formed between people that meet at the same time every week at 5pm, so that if you don’t have the courage to say “Hi” the first time, there’s always next week. And the next one. And the one after that. That’ll pick you up from LAX because they see it as quality time (they exist!!). That’ll offer to take your kid last minute when you need a breather. That’ll listen and nod their head when you say you’re actually going to be single for a while this time (you’re not). That’ll come with pork dumpling soup and the willingness to hold you when you’re in the abyss, ready to remind you that it matters to them that you exist . That’ll put their phones away and do a craft + baking night with you on election day because it’s all you’re capable of.
That’s all to say, I’m less interested in the the type of connections where you follow each other on IG and watch each other’s lives unfold wistfully until you inevitably unfollow them 6 months later 🤗.
But where exactly can you make these types of connections, you might ask? Through finding community. Sticky community 🦠.
Thanks to brands, social media platforms, and corporate culture, the word “community” has become heavily diluted. The definition of community I like to use is a group of people organized around a shared interest or identity that cultivates a sense of belonging. A key feature is that community has a past history to reflect on and future gatherings to look forward to. People in the community building world like to call communities that have opportunities for repeat connection “sticky”.
The problem is that these sticky connections are getting harder to make, as we’re more averse to making the commitments that are necessary to form them. We’re much more comfortable finding fleeting connection online, and less comfortable having impromptu engagements in-person. “Third spaces”, the places we’ve historically met outside of the home and work to form sticky connections, are vanishing. Even the US surgeon general has announced loneliness as a national health crisis. Yikes 🥴
So yes, that’s the scene we’re working with—but all is far from lost. Connection is the most human thing we have, and if humans are one thing, it’s resilient. In fact, leaning into community is the only thing keeping me going today, and the only thing that keeps me hopeful for tomorrow. It’s also one of the things we can do every single day to create real, tangible change. Connection is how we get from where we are today in a country of divisiveness and fear, to one of mutual aid, interdependence, and grace. And I don’t just mean the people in our inner circle—I mean the community that comes when we challenge ourselves to connect with people outside of our bubbles, even if social forces are working hard to make us more insular.
So.
In the last 6 months, my friend Aria and I have been building out FLOC—an IRL community for community gatherers in Los Angeles. We built FLOC for a simple reason: we want to help people find community, and we believe the best way to do that is to support the people building them. As lifelong community gatherers ourselves, we know how much work it takes to cultivate and sustain a community, from organizing meetups, to facilitating membership, to dealing with conflict, to developing culture, to finding meeting spaces—the list goes on.
Over the coming months, FLOC will be organizing meetups across the city with small subgroups of gatherers to create networks of education, support, and resilience. And we’ll be using Ratplay to communicate about upcoming FLOC meetups, initiatives, community asks, and of course, the occasional earnest/mildly chaotic essay on community (what would RatPlay be without them?). We’ll also use Ratplay to do deep dives on LA communities we love (or as I like to call them, Rat Colonies) and the gatherers who built them, like we did before. No prescriptive publishing cadence, just sending when there’s something to say. Our inboxes are much too full, anyway.
So here’s what I have to offer you, my gorgeous rodents, along with an ask.
First, a gift 🎁: the FLOC community index, a growing list of the communities and clubs across LA. Although FLOC is for current and aspiring community gatherers, we’re doing all this work to provide more and stronger opportunities for the people of Los Angeles to connect. See a community we’re missing? Let us know and we’ll add it in.
Note: not all communities in the index have the same level of stickiness, but our goal is to encourage the adoption of practices that lead to stickier connections.
And now for the asks. We’re looking for:
Community-friendly spaces for gatherer meet-ups (to host anywhere from 8-20 people)
Amazing LA communities that aren’t on the index yet
Introductions to community gatherers that we should know (on the list and not!)
And last but not least—we’re looking for you to be brave. I know you’re probably feeling helpless, and possibly even hopeless. But if you’re looking for something tangible you can do right now, every day, to create the world you want to see 4+ years from now, go out and make connections. Particularly the less comfortable ones, the ones with people different from you. Go on monthly member hunts with the rockhounds of Culver City Rock and Mineral Society. Sing the songs of secret society LA Breakfast Club every Wednesday in Los Feliz. Find your chosen family at Skid Row Run Club on Mondays and Thursdays. And when those relationships get tough—which they inevitably will—do the dirty work to give each other grace and find commonality. Reminder: the people who elected that guy aren’t going anywhere, so the future we want can only be achieved together. When in doubt, go towards connection 🫂.
Go play,
CK
P.S. If you ever want to talk about community (your own or more generally) or you’ve got an idea for building one and need a thought partner, send me a note! Always down to hear what you’re up to, connect you with the right people, and share knowledge. You can reach me at ratplay@gmail.com or floc.community and we’ll find time to meet up.
