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I had to go to the post office & the lady in front of me bought these so I remembered that I should too. Old people at the post office, old people at the medical office next door. That's where my dentist is. Their elevator is broken and there's wheezing old people trying to get to the 5th floor with me. I can't run the steps but I don't have to stop & catch my breath either.
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Go figure, the RTA is getting old too. They're more busted than me but used more too. Still going. They've updated the upholstery on a couple of the Red Line's cars lately. That's a treat, when you get one of those cars.
Meanwhile memyselfandI is also about to be 50. All my favorite things are pretty new, in the scheme of things, but generationally bound too. Isolated, maybe impermanent steps toward a different or better product.
This place makes me think of that, since it was superseded by inferior services that were nevertheless better products. I got into debates with my boys over the '24 rulebooks that are coming out. They don't do anything for me. I don't care about them. They want to get into the weeds of character building or the esoteric details of the (totally adequate) system. I look at it & feel it's too commercial, too much a generic mass-market product. Not for me but no disrespect either. I can see the old pen & paper getting chewed up and discarded, replaced by shinier, more commercial properties. So, holdout on both fronts.
All of the things are 50 & have a foot in the 2oth & 21st centuries. I was made for the 20th & haven't had a good 21st. That's just facts for a lot of people around, '99 was a pretty good year for most people, at least how I remember it. Can't say it's been uphill since then, just in the state of affairs that we're compelled to endure.
One supposes that the turn is toward commerce, lowest-common-denominators. Me? I see the abandonment of the last real pillar of the 20th century, television, as having a considerable consequence. I went to my little cousin's wedding with my sister. Rode across the state with her & listened as she explained ideas told to her by rupert murdoch's team. It's interesting, the world of the television viewer, what they think about, the names they know. The next president is appointing other tv stars & it seems like the weakness of tv is that it's most discerning audience members have long gone, but its persistent claim to the mass of americans is easily forgotten. They love that shit, being advertised to at all times, being belittled & shamed. They love that shit & can't form authentic feelings because their interiority is prescribed. I don't like it, but it's been so long since me & my sis lived together, it's weird to catch up & see how vast the difference in perspective between us has grown.
The dissolution of mass culture is, to my mind, an unalloyed good. Seeing the lingering influence of the monoculture consuming us all is a bit more to ask for, but I'm constantly struck by how insignificant the distinctions people are angered by. Only the dumbest people are going to be animated by these grievances, but animating the electorate is the opposite of the intention of the monoculture. So they get mad about the world moving on & marshal their antagonism into the most anodyne resistance of all - voting. I'm hopeful to see the mass abandonment of the rule of law in the near term, is what I'm saying. Maybe. Keep hope alive you know?
Eventually I'll have lived in the 21st for longer. I know the century/millennium has always been an arbitrary distinction, but there's a lot of power in arbitrary distinctions. My mother's religious conversion & subsequent psychosis are part of the millenarian religious turn of the back quarter of the 20th. My apocalyptic dread/longing definitely derives in having endured that too. The project, as I see it for myself, is to be hopeful as these things are destroyed, to be optimistic about the end of things that I've been promised & to imagine a world that's better than this one. It's very easy to do lately. I'm optimistic that 25 years from now, I'll be vindicated & the next millennium will finally be free of 20th century folly.