the vortex
There's a cafe in town. I walk in my wife. We don't go there often.
A bunch of old women playing mahjong.
"I just saw your daddy," one of them says to my wife. "He was eating an apple."
My wife is polite. "Is that right?"
"You look just like your momma," another old lady says. "We know who you are."
We order some fancy coffee drinks. Caramel or whatever the fuck they put in there. I normally never buy that sort of thing, but I figure for the local place, I'll splurge and pay extra for some sugar.
The first thing the woman asks after taking our order is, "So you're from here?" -- not surprised that we are, but that there's someone in the county she doesn't know.
We're still partially immune to the small town vortex. It will get us eventually. If it properly had us in its grip, we would know the names of all the old ladies, their families, trades, where they lived, and so on. In the course of our other daily business, we'd run into their kin, mention we'd seen them playing mahjong at the cafe, and then that person would in turn run into some further relation of ours, and tell that they'd run into us at the grocery store or the garbage dump or some other thing. The vortex would churn. And it would never stop.
My wife finds this grating, probably because she grew up with it, but I think it's hilarious. The more meaningless the detail, the more reason for it to be relayed. The thing I love the most about where I live is that nothing here matters, and nothing that happens here ever will. The vortex of town gossip is an amplification of that nothingness on top of itself.
A bunch of old women playing mahjong.
"I just saw your daddy," one of them says to my wife. "He was eating an apple."
My wife is polite. "Is that right?"
"You look just like your momma," another old lady says. "We know who you are."
We order some fancy coffee drinks. Caramel or whatever the fuck they put in there. I normally never buy that sort of thing, but I figure for the local place, I'll splurge and pay extra for some sugar.
The first thing the woman asks after taking our order is, "So you're from here?" -- not surprised that we are, but that there's someone in the county she doesn't know.
We're still partially immune to the small town vortex. It will get us eventually. If it properly had us in its grip, we would know the names of all the old ladies, their families, trades, where they lived, and so on. In the course of our other daily business, we'd run into their kin, mention we'd seen them playing mahjong at the cafe, and then that person would in turn run into some further relation of ours, and tell that they'd run into us at the grocery store or the garbage dump or some other thing. The vortex would churn. And it would never stop.
My wife finds this grating, probably because she grew up with it, but I think it's hilarious. The more meaningless the detail, the more reason for it to be relayed. The thing I love the most about where I live is that nothing here matters, and nothing that happens here ever will. The vortex of town gossip is an amplification of that nothingness on top of itself.