One thing that has been striking to me in the most cutting way recently has been my inability to see real, sweeping paradigm shifts that are currently happening all around me. It's absurd to me that I have missed these. Like a ranger who can discern the markings of recent rain, but not the huge footprint right in front of his face, I have missed the obvious and expected present.
Let me explain.
I've been in something of a mood recently. This happens sporadically to me because I'm a uncouth nothing millennial, lacking direction and sensibility and balance (and all other worst of adjectives) in my life. Also, I party too much (so there's that). It's not uncommon for me to, for weeks uninterrupted, "drink life to the lees" in this (to others at least) insufferable self-assuredness. But even Ulysses must have his slow days--the ones where he can barely force himself to do the things that he needs to do--even that he likes to do. Most of it depends on circumstance: Ulysses' gods are "Tennyson" and mine are "Jack" and "Daniels".
But I don't want to talk about that now. I was walking home from my regular/required/noncompulsory daily prayers to the gods of iron at the gym and reading my current time-monopoly "The Handmaid's Tale" (no time for that here; leave it at "excellently written and incisive/depresses and scars the hell out of me"). I had the book tucked under one arm as I ducked into Shaw's to grab a quick lunch (chicken thighs...but who's asking, right?). The cashier's reaction is what surprised me.
I suppose the most audacious changes are the result of a series of infinitesimal alterations. The cashier was incredulous. "When I was little girl I read, but now TV is too much distraction. [sic]"
Honestly, at first I thought she meant to imply that she was surprised that I was reading. I guess if there is a "type" of person who reads, there are all sorts of prejudiced reasons why it wouldn't be me. I wouldn't begrudge her for thinking something like this--there are worse prejudices out there and for me, cis/white/male/uppermiddleclass, to complain about such a slight would be both asinine and comical.
No, she was implying something a lot worse. She was surprised that the people in general read. That the plurality of persons of the world still have readers amongst them seemed, up until now, a given. Apparently that s no longer the case.
We are already "there". The "there" that happens in the future. The "there" at the end of the sentence. The "there" that is only mentioned in predictions of dystopian chaos. The final "there".
When did we reach "there"? When did "there" become "here"? A close friend of mine noted that it's been this way for a long time. Bingeing TV--even admittedly bad TV--rather than even entertaining the possibility that reading may offer respite from the noise. This was always something that happened to faceless consumers in nameless cities far away in Florida or in Dakota--not to people that I see and know and socialize with weekly.
Even more startling is how blind and deaf I have been to the noise. I suppose that is what has me the most affected.
For now, I suppose, the melancholy continues...
