The power is back on after a month of languishing. I never know when it is going to come back on. It comes and I go out on the bike and write and make music and enjoy the light as best as I can, secretly dreading the point at which the lights go out again, a dread that is mercifully diminished because I feel intoxicated. Out of shape and quickly winded, but buzzing.
Its curious being out on the path. You can see the weirdos popping up as the widespread social isolation and fragmentation makes its effects felt. Those fringe figures breaking off, growing into strange plants in their isolated environments...everyone out exercising and doing their best to commune together, orbiting together but not quite touching, each person displaying striking variations in visual complexion, bodily movements, and personalities. As HST said, "When the going gets weird, the weird go pro."
A man walks his way down the path swinging his fists, another roller blades and conducts odd martial arts patterns low to the ground. A homeless man sits out on the path every afternoon in the sun with his bags stacked up high to shield himself. A smiling woman with a weathered face and a hodgepodge of clothing styles, topped with a cowboy hat. Feminine-looking men, masculine-looking women, the great drift into idiosyncrasy from the past monoculture birthed from mythology and practice continues.
Though I'm quite blind to my own projection in social space, I imagine I am one of them. We all cobble together visual cues, ideological commitments, and archetypal sensibilities from movements and individuals temporally and geographically distant in the hopes of crafting something not just new, but worthy of life.
There is a widening gap between those that fear and loathe difference, those that wish to isolate and destroy the difference to purge some mythical core and restore it back to its past glory, which is entirely illusory, and those that learn to love the difference, to reach out to that difference and reconfigure it into a new whole.
Those that wish to disintegrate difference will only disintegrate themselves in turn as they further isolate themselves in their homogeneity, for such an impulse is birthed from fear, which itself is the ultimate divider. Those that learn to love radical difference will experience something that approaches pretty closely the concept of one. This is a pretty abstract metaphysical/religious claim, but I think it can pretty dependably predict outcomes across historical time and space.
