The room is dark, though strips of pale light coming in through the window slats bathe the back wall. Outside a window burns muddy yellow across the alley, where the occasional voice rises up. Black women are talking and laughing excitedly in the courtyard. A motorcycle belches in the distance. A vacuum cleaner howls next door. The night is buzzing outside.
I imagine the bars and clubs are filled up downtown. Took a bike ride down there last night to meet someone at one of the bars. Thought I was doing better with social interactions but it definitely took a few beers to ease my body and mind out of lock-up. Keep working at it I guess. Met some people. I wonder if I appeared as rigid as I felt.
It's funny how deeply wired we are to mirror each others' moods. We search faces. Body movements analyzed in the peripheral give us signals we encode in terms of what it means when we move like that ourselves. We judge everyone by reinterpreting their signals and behavior as things that we ourselves do and act accordingly. I wonder how accurate this system really is? We do share universal patterns of thought and action, but it can't always line up perfectly. The inner life is so much more complex than the physical expressions of it. But we have the basic idea at least.
We are remarkably networked. And these networks seem to obey certain physical rules. A depressed person in a group of three can really pull down the mood fast, but a depressed person in a group of 10 is easier to ignore and the behavior is absorbed less. And as each person adjusts to one another the new system state manifests other behaviors that eventually lead to yet another system state, as if waves or something pass through. I think of fire moving through a forest.
It's also striking how many people ignore these connections and rationalize everything in terms of individual motives, as if we were all isolated islands that simply materialized whole in the physical world. No. We grew in the world and grew as a result of our own connection with ourselves. We are connected to everything and everything is connected to us.
I imagine the rich are pretty socially insulated, but they are still plugged in. Many of them must know deep in the back of their minds that something is wrong.
"Everyone is on edge here because we are all packed in like rats," he said. In every direction I occasionally hear someone arguing or fighting. Maybe. But people were like that in the suburbs too. And I even saw it in Montana. The fabric that binds us socially is wearing down. You can actually see it in the behavior of money, which is supposed to only mean anything because we share it. It leaks out everywhere. Our freedom of movement fades: an array of choices disappears like dying embers. Mistakes become more costly. Stress rises. Why do social bodies break? Why does the pleasure principle and the will to power pool in insulated social groups?
Yes, everyone knows something is wrong, but it cannot yet be fixed, because not enough people know how. Because in the end as a mass we are social. We behave in accordance with others. All the more evidence for us to reimagine ourselves as a wavelike property. And so everyone vibrates with one another even across a colony of isolated dwellings.
Plenty of time to think alone here. A car hisses by in the alley. The cat stretches on her cushion, her white body faintly luminous in the dark.
The TV is glowing dully, as I've let it sit idle for a bit. The Xbox Live Dashboard is becoming an increasingly pathetic site, and really everything with advertising. There is a desperation in the ads: bright intense words, endlessly contrived messaging, childish appeals to excitement. It's like they don't know what to do anymore, and simply study us as if we were objects and damn there's gotta be the right combination of words, sights, and sounds to make us buy. Please buy!
It's okay. There are in fact an increasing amount of people who can better understand reality, and do in fact know what must be done, and they grow together and connect together with every passing day. I like to think I'm one of them. This alone gives me peace and patience and I can sit here in the dark.
