Customary.
Sunday, May 10th, 2020
Last night before going to sleep and sometime this afternoon during our content-consuming marathon, Sammy and I were talking a while about how we, or how humans, or how some humans adjust to what is a very abnormal situation as the days parade by.
I’ve grown accustomed to this pace, it’s not quite like breathing out and breathing in, her smiles, her rounds for getting some steps in, her bandanna for going outside, ah, well, apologies to Lerner and Loewe—and Ms. Sam.
It is quite revelatory how the accustomization happens and how the brain, when you work on relaxing and short-circuiting loops of fretting, just kinda recalibrates and, just like when they moved the garbage pickup day from Monday morning to Tuesday morning (what.. 5 years ago?), without conscious rewiring one somehow rewires sufficiently not enough to forget the old pattern, but to make room for the new procedures, safety steps, rituals.
I think this “making room” at this point in May is good foundational work. I don’t think there will be a reversal anytime soon; it’s more likely we’ll have new ways of being awkwardly overlaid on the old ones.
People used to chain-smoke and accidentally knock over cans of Coke into multimillion dollar video equipment while paying $500 or so an hour for the privilege of waiting for huge machines wind tape to the very place you want an edit to occur. Almost all of that is now in the dustbin of…well, old TV memories, but like this other stuff, it’s not like I’ve forgotten how it smelled (rancid tobacco and overheating electronics is a very distinctive combo), I just made room in my world for a new way of creating and being, and I’m more careful when my coffee mug is near my computer keyboard.
