The Set of Modernistic Identities
We get up and have coffee. We shower or not. Have that run or not. Turn on the TV or radio or other background noise. We drive to work or school or the grocery. We say ‘hi how are you’ and ‘im good’ and ‘thatll be seven fifty-one’ and ‘how was your weekend’. Occasionally we say ‘terrible’ instead of fine, but mostly we lie. We move things in warehouses and stock shelves and click mice and answer phones. We get blinded behind the wheel by the setting sun. We engage in audiovisualdigital looping behaviors. We drink and get high. We stay sober and do meetings or church. We stay up too late and sleep too little. We get up to make coffee and the cat dashes in for her treats when she hears the microwave door. We get distracted. We make a list or not. We turn on the noise…
We click and scroll. We open twenty tabs when we went to chase down one piece of information. We leave on the radio even though it’s subtly agitating. We read a book. We allow no gaps. We avoid thinking about the climate or where the roads or tomatoes come from. We growl angry corrections and expansions to the news. We go through the motions. We do what we’re supposed to do with our kids and act like that’s enough. We have no idea how to give them our hard-earned lessons. We repeat affirmations and lies. We run from our guilt that’s kicked our legs out fifty times before. We take pills and pay dreams no mind, but we wish we did remember our dreams. We make false starts on too many projects. We run on asphalt and grass, and like it, and guilt ourselves for not enough.
When we run or bike or ride the lawn mower or play Halo Whatever our thoughts loop and songs stick. Before too long the environment pops out, or at least the squirrel mind shuts up. It’s just cover this file of grass, then that one, then another, too loud for talk or music. We walk with the music and after four blocks our unease quiets and maybe we want to keep going at the end, but it’s a long way back. We do yoga with the wordless music and the obsessive worry, barely noticed most of the day, turns into soft loops of mental images and memories. We see solutions or see how we do too much. We get home and snap on a noise machine or glowing rectangle, and quick as that the fraction of peace vanishes into a fugue of anxious and unsustained actions. The I continues to fall…
We forget how to have long conversations. We talk about ourselves or articles or TV in between looking at whatever on our glowing-rectangle-click-noise-makers. Click. Click. Scroll. Heart. Repost. There’s no more elevator music, but every restaurant and shop scrolls perpetual music we hardly notice. There are 500 interactive networks and 10 billion websites, and 10,000 magazines and journals, and 500 TV channels, and infinite streaming radio and podcasts. There is too much canon to follow and the artists that tickle you most will never be among them. We forget how to talk to people. Long before most of you did during COVID. The island keeps on receding. We are awake all night as our addled neurons spin up more fear and grandiosity and bizarre ideas. We keep on searching for another method or plan, even when we really know there’s never going to be a complete solution of us. We try to face up to ourselves and how we can live better, and never get more than a little way. Lather, rinse, repeat. Cleanse, fold, manipulate.
We imagine a better past. We imagine a better future. We think about origins. We think about the unreachable infinity of space. We think about our small blue spherical eggshell. We can’t think of Them as able to change. We can’t see through our mythologies of fungible groups. We get lost in groupthink and shifty symbologies. We compose great art. We compose junk sketches. We distract and diminish. We zoom in and clarify. We synapse and pulse rate. We germinate and bumblebee. We interfere and amplify. We stellar fusion and naked mole-rat. We get threaded through buttons and the photographs chatter amongst themselves. We walk in and out of this and that universe. The pockets separate and fuse and recombine. We snap into dream and forget that wakeful island.
Lost in Mist 