Troubling your consciousness

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Do you ever spend way too much time ruminating on things that annoy you? Like Young Republicans and racist babyboomers who list their education as ‘the school of hard knocks’ on Facebook, and TikTok trends, and when people younger than you call you ‘hun’. Or when people you used to talk to about everything with ignore you? Or you pass by each other in a crowded space and you both avert your eyes like the other doesn’t exist because it’s all too far gone now.

Or when others ask you what you do for a living not because they’re really interested but because they’re silently determining how much respect to give you. Or how we never truly realize what we’ve got until it’s gone, just like Joni said, and now all the childhood homes you once lived in and the forests you once roamed are being destroyed to build townhouses and state-of-the-art industrial parks with spas where you’ll get facials and drink white wine one day, And you think: oh how sad. I hope there’s at least one good sushi restaurant nearby.

Or when people are unkind to service industry staff or trainees in any profession. Or when they don’t tip. When all the lanes at the grocery store are closed and the only option is to use the self checkout and you’re tired of talking to and through a machine all day and you just want to look someone in the eyes for once and say, “how are you?” and maybe have that reciprocated so you can make a funny quip about needing to get out of the house and you’ve been storing up a stellar one-liner all day and now you can’t use it and you have to ring the bell and they’re looking at you like an idiot thinking you don’t know how to use this machine and you mutter something like, “I do. I just want you to have a job” and they try to explain that this gives them a job and they can do other jobs in the store and they defend Galen Weston or whoever the baron CEO is and you realize they’re too far gone and the cute little quip you dreamed up in your mind is all but forgotten.

Like what the fuck did it all become?

And then you just wanna go home and play Bop It because you’re really hoping to beat your last high score.