And I've been putting out the fire with gasoline
Putting out fire
WITH GASOLINEEEEEEE.
- Cat People (Putting Out Fire) - David Bowie
I joined the local bowling league.
Other than that you don’t really need to know anything about the scene except:
it’s full of outsiders and the type of people that make you squeeze your loved ones hand a little harder.
The saving grace is it’s not a “danger approaching” tense it’s more of a brace-for-their-weirdness-to-hit-you type of tense.
These ‘people’ are pseudo human.
Or too human.
Probably too human.
They’re not worried about a single social factor if they Bowl In Their Free Time.
So I’m in the league with these aliens and everything is happening quickly, no rest for the wicked, lick your fingers and grab a properly sized bowling ball, lace up your sneaks, do your jumping jacks, stretch, snap tighten your headband, pull up tube socks and man I’m so nervous I’m about to cry but the big fella, 6’5, 250lbs with a handle bar mustache is sizing me up form across the lane like I’m some sort of rookie so I glance at Marias cat, return a smile from her, tear up a little, and mutter “it’s going to be a long season.”
Putnams Bowling Alone has been bouncing through my head and it’s not how you’d think. I’m laffing thinking about it.
I’ve read pieces, excerpts for long ago classes, a fourth of the book, maybe, if I’m trying to impress the local librarian with strong cheek bones and curly black hair then a third, but in my head I have the whole idea encapsulated to the point that societal observations can be deduced through the perceived lens of the authors point.
This is probably a mental disease.
Or a peak at the purest instance of Impatience and Narcissism we have
Life, society, reality, through Putnam’s (perceived) idealogical observation is in essence that the idea of community is disappearing. I’d agree. And he wrote that 22 years ago.
It’s only gotten worse. I won’t let any woman: mom, sister, girlfriend, female at the check out counter at Waffle House at 1:48am that I met that night of the rainstorm in 2019, run around downtown alone during the night without letting me know first or taking a weapon (.38 mag that I’ve trained them in terms of handling and recoil response.)
The idea of a community is real. Drowning while being strangled but still alive. The rise in digital community, place where you connect with minds closer to you than ever imagined possible is a final, golden nail in the coffin.
Wait until Praxis. Wait until beliefs, ideological aesthetic, pour from online back into the physical…
Does this sound counterintuitive? Remember, it’s All inverted.
Redemption, shimmering light through haunted woods are found in these pockets of places. The more obscure the more honest.
People fear home schooling and ‘not being properly socialized,’ for…
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