My local cafe has fallen on hard times. Business is fine, but the new owner wants it to be, you know, “a place.” Quiz night, music turned up, a new menu that aims to be everything except yummy—this used to be a good place to hang. Now? Well, it is now nothing to write home about.
Think of that. Writing home.
» Mom, Dad, I met someone . . .
» Hey, you should see this campus . . .
» Trieste is beautiful. Can’t wait to show you the pictures when we get back . . .
Of course, no one writes home now. Now you text. Maybe you call. No decision about what’s worth sharing needs to be made.
Should this be shared? How does my experience rate as news to those in my world? Is this special to me? Perhaps to them too? Such gatekeepers of taste and ego got trampled long ago. Without space to even ask such questions everything is shared all the time. Nothing rises to the level of unimportant.
Change the speed of anything—travel, birthrate, news intake—and you change everything. Whoever figured out you could ride an animal changed the landscape. Trains transformed it, the cars decimated it. And in the time it took to write a letter or make a call from a landline the citadel of home could maintain integrity. Now we scroll at some chimerical version of that home a thousand times a day.
And the feelin' comin' from my bones says, "Find a home"
—White Stripes
As I write this I am looking at a tall Dutch man somewhere between fifty and seventy-five in jean shorts that are too short and a black T-shirt calling out for sleeves. He’s sitting on a bench far from where we coffer drinkers drink. He has a bike, a water bottle, a Coke, and a bag. He has asked several passersby for the time and rolled a cigarette with trembly hands. He may own a canal house or maybe he lives in someone’s attic. He is not homeless, exactly, but as his T-shirt reads “Fuck The Rules” my guess is that his appointments are done for the day. Of course, despite his street dweller get-up, he sports typical Dutch-dude lifeguard hair.
I imagine him struggling not to break down completely, the hippe world he once embraced lost now to the connectivity that dislocates us all.
Worth writing home about? Dunno. But then again, other than the page, I’ve never known where to be.