The social spectacle

2022-01-09 @Blog

I don’t normally speak of social dynamic. Yesterday I tried writing a commentary to the respect, but quickly realized that I’m hardly the authority. Then I tried to reason why that’s the case, and likewise couldn’t produce sufficient rationale.

I’ve glided between groups of beings over a few decades, exchanged energies, dissolved, transitioned, resolved, absolved, resettled. You’d think I have a clue by now.

I feel I mainly conserve energy. Fully vested into the authentic, meaningful, intimate, poetic, silent, even awkward exchanges without smartphones or similar instigators of entropy, I otherwise quickly disconnect and abandon.

Conservation of energy: half drowsy voice, half-open eyelids of half-discernible eye contact, half disinterested, half disconcerted, half indifferent, half out the door, half at the rooftop, a bipartite existence, the virtue one affords as Alastor, the (evanescent) spirit of solitude.

Had I read that paradoxically, the knack for solitude incites the knack for gregariousness?

It’s no frills with me, but if I feel 100% on the one side, I’ll reciprocate the full 105 (accounting for inflation). Raw, but authentic: in the end, I anticipate the social bang for the buck. But then so should you, if we’re on the same page.

I’ll not even mind the cigarette smoke, provided it blows in any other direction. Or I’ll set a social distance of thrice the federally encouraged, no remorse on my part.

However, most of my recent social gatherings I can’t consider but spectacles, viewed from one of the first rows as a spectator whom the amateur comic occasionally engages when lacking material.

It can’t be anything else, not while I lack the propensity for quickly digestible answers to all the ‘origin’ questions, not while I need repeat my name upwards of four times.

Lo! ‘tis a gala night
Within the lonesome latter years!
An angel throng, bewinged, bedight
In veils, and drowned in tears,
Sit in a theatre, to see
A play of hopes and fears,
While the orchestra breathes fitfully
The music of the spheres.

I don’t mind the spectacle, the show about nothing, the half-functioning lavatory, the multiple language streams without subtitles or voice-overs, the occasional commercial breaks, a sound score which doesn’t reconcile the scene, food service in-house or delivered in pouches of sealed aluminum strapped to the backs of extras on bicycles, the main cast mindful of the queue, others sheer products of incident.

It’s a gala night for the front spectators, tons of optionality for active or passive participation. And are we still to hear grunge rock fifty years hence?

Questions, comments? Connect.