It’s Merely Civilization

It’s been sort of disconcerting, there’s lots of angry yelling in the streets of the city the last couple days. Contrary to what many would believe, New Yorkers are pretty civil to each other most of the time. Yesterday, in a twelve-block stretch, I probably witnessed/heard at least four altercations in the morning – and similar experience in the evening. I was willing to dismiss it as a bad karma day – but this morning seemed the same. I wonder what’s going on with people?

There’s so much unrest and discord in the world (real and perceived) and meanwhile the quarantine of a city of 11 million people (Wuhan) just came across the news, due to the new coronavirus. I hope that this is not something I will look back at years from now and say – “there, that was the moment it all started”!

Not that I’m a pessimist or anything, I’m not. But I just finished reading the excellent Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, which happens to be about living in a world twenty years after societal collapse due to a flu virus. I think this book does an excellent job portraying the ways people would react to such a situation. It’s also really interesting, in that it keeps shifting back and forth in the timeline to times before the collapse and times twenty years later, showing how they are all interconnected. The structuring of it reminded me a little of Cloud Atlas (I’ve seen the movie, not read the book, and yes it’s not the best thing ever) in that it strived to show how the actions of many people are intertwined and interdependent on each other over time. (Funny, I don’t think I ever read that Wikipedia article on Cloud Atlas – it actually describes the plot in a way that is understandable – no small feat.)

Sort of like The Butterfly Effect.

DiaryMistress and I watched The Station Agent last night (this entry started out as one thing and I guess has now just turned into a bunch of links about movies 😂) – it was really good. I had never seen it, but always heard it was good – and also the first movie where people realized Peter Dinklage could act. Turns out, it was filmed in some locations I’m semi-familiar with. It had that definitive feel of an early 2000’s indie film, but awesome nonetheless – excellent acting by Patricia Clarkson as well.

I went looking for a tweet I saw this morning to paste here, but I couldn’t find it – the gist of it was “everyone has battles they are fighting, whether seen or unseen”. That was one of the themes running through The Station Agent, I think. Something we all need to remember, and as I’ve said before, one of my primary reasons for creating Open Diary.

Nobody in this world has it all together. We all have battles we are fighting, seen or unseen.

Not sure where I was going with this, but I think I’ve run out of steam. Also, have a new keyboard and we have NOT made peace with each other yet – the spacing and travel of the keys is not making me happy.

Looking at that sentence makes me a little sad – we so often let our happiness be defined by the devices we interact with (and the stuff that emerges from their screens), sometimes I think a societal collapse would do us all good. We could go back to interacting with each other as humans, rather than interacting with each other through all these digital and electronic layers.

Gosh, this entry keeps turning dark.

There’s too much I would miss if technology was suddenly removed from my life:

• the ability to reach almost anywhere in the world by jumping on a plane or a boat
• being able to listen to any song or album I want to from the last seventy years
• light at the flick of the switch – since the Thanksgiving-set-yourself-on-fire episode, I have a problematic relationship with candles
• being able to FaceTime people who are far away from me
• seeing all of the 43,919 digital photos I’ve taken, displayed on a map that shows me down to street level where I was when I took them
• clean water
• power drills and saws, I’m good with a chisel and handsaw, but I don’t like it
• I could probably do this all day

Don’t get me wrong – I have my Wilderness Survival merit badge, I could get by in the woods if I needed to – I just don’t want to. (One of my favorite merit badges – for the final test, they set us down ten miles in the middle of a wilderness, with just a map, a compass, and whatever we could pack in a Coke can. I made it out in less than twenty-four hours.)

Have a good day!