~a column by Colleen O’Brien
In this odd piece of history we’re living through – maybe not odd in its general bad behavior by humans (a million-year species flaw) but odd in its particulars of constant news, a continual, endless, loud, ill-spoken (bad grammar on a regular basis) blather of being kept informed –-phones, cars telling us what to do, loud speakers from every business, talking gasoline pumps, other vehicles’ blasting tunes … we live in noise pollution day and night.
We also seem to have to hurry while trying to do things just beyond our ken, our recourse being to take our devices and autos to someone else (no changing the oil in your own garage any more, and heaven knows I don’t have a clue about a dead computer) –- I’m finding it increasingly difficult to maintain a positive attitude or any goodwill. Why won’t my computer just turn on when I push the button? My toaster works, why doesn’t my HP?
I’m just as crabby as everybody else even as I crab about crabs on the road, in the store, on the phone and using my lawn for their dogs’ relief.
I read various commentarians about how to maintain sanity and pursue sainthood in an insane and despotic world, which I understand to mean that I split myself into two peeps and operate them separately during my day. The gurus advise, also, that I do this on a schedule so I don’t become confused.
I finally try it, and it goes like this: morning means niceness, first to myself and my little girl inside me while watching eagerly for the dawning sun, smelling the flowers or, depending on locale, admiring snowdrifts that cover the neighbor’s horrible backyard. It means writing a poem of love or nature or children or heaven. It means concentrating on my breath and my meditating while flicking invasive thoughts off my left shoulder. It means getting the saintly things done just after a calm breakfast reading St. Thomas Aquinas or Dagwood. It suggests I then do my goodwill duties – this time of year that would be Christmas cards to faraway old people and pumpkin bread for acquaintances within driving distance. I’ve filled a couple of bags of Salvo (Salvation Army) donations and am encouraged to think about hanging cheery lights on my bushes, a wreath on my door.
I’m then told that I will be exhausted and peckish, so I must have a light lunch and a nap before I tackle my devices – my afternoon schedule. That I would have to go this far without turning on my computer or my phone might be difficult at first. If I don’t tune into them, I may feel like I did when I ignored a baby crying in the crib. I am told it will soon become second nature, like those exhausting days – leave them be and they’ll quit crying; in this case “bing-bing-binging,” “tweeting,” and howling loudly (my dryer, I’m assuming the guru means).
Rested and resolute, however, I flip on my phone to several messages and two calls. One is from a number and name I know, the rest are not, so I can delete them and leave my phone on my pillow, not answering the call from a friend (that’s for evening, with a glass of wine). My computer, which sometimes turns on immediately (I blow it a kiss when it does this) and more often takes five attempts to show up, leaps to attention today, ready for me to read the newsfeeds.
I try a couple, and I feel grossly tried. The news sites are so covered with ads popping in and out, covering up the news items, confusing me on what I’m supposed to do – push the “Continue” button or start over? According to guru directions, I am to quit the newsfeed if I become exasperated. I quit. A burgeoning power rises in me from this gratifyingly quiet task.
I can now opt for YouTube, where sometimes I will get on MSNBC without having to prove I’m a no-account with them. Wasn’t there a time when I turned on the radio and there was news? No longer. I must have a password, I have to belong, I have to pay money.
It dawns on me as I process my life of media influence in the afternoons and living with my head in the sand in the mornings, that despite my devices’ intent to lure me on for all day, I am being trained by their behavior to ignore them because they annoy me so. The commentarians didn’t mention this; I am discovering it on my own. I figure this means that I can ignore advice from those all-knowing strangers, too, and move on.
I leave for the grocery store, attempting to live like the Mediterraneans, who thrive on the best diet in the world. Fresh vegetables daily is part of their longevity, their gaiety, I suppose, and their allowance to eat bread and drink wine. My grocery store is not Italian. It annoys me. Their corporate has a bad habit of moving products to different aisles on a regular basis so that I often think I’m in the wrong store. Why do they do this? Oh, yes, on the presumption that I’ll come upon something I’ve never seen before and instantly buy it. They are wrong. Their marketing people are delusional – I do not want change; I want familiar. I want peanut butter where it was last time I bought peanut butter. I do not have time to fart around in a grocery store where I must be a detective to find peanut butter! And what happened to my brand?
See how crabby I am? Is this because I’m getting old (you do know this is a corporate trope of falseness, possibly even a prejudice against older people who move more slowly, yes, and see less well, of course); I must remember that corporate needs to sell more stuff and think themselves clever.
I include in evil corporate machinations not only the grocery business, but Apple computer business, Verizon phone business, Aetna insurance business (my new card makes me no longer a PPO but a PCP, or maybe it’s a PGP – hard to see that tiny writing. The code will change at the first of the year, less than a month away, an agent informs me, she herself muttering about the stupidness of such an expense).
My auto clinic can no longer bring me home or bring my car to me because they have too many customers and can’t spare the mechanics. This puts me in a pickle because my friends nearby are failing – blind, deaf, can no longer drive – and I am reduced to Uber to get home and then to return later in the day for my vehicle or to sitting in the unwelcoming waiting room all day. Surely, they could hire some out-of-work person to take me home.
My political party sent me a note that I am the only Democrat in America who has not signed Joe Biden’s birthday card. I like Biden a lot, but I don’t even send birthday cards to my grandchildren. I am up to my eyeballs with the Democratic National Party’s attitude to me. If I weren’t such a yellow dog Democrat, I’d vote for . . . well, no I wouldn’t…but you get the drift.
When I was in Junior High, Miss King made us memorize “If,” a poem to guide us toward a future of patience and nobility. One of the lines lives on in my brain when I’d prefer to remember other things, but here it is:
If you can bear to hear the truth . . . / Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools . . .
It seems I can only bear the truth if I become bipolar, schizophrenic, two-faced, deceitful, double-dealing, hypocritical, duplicitous or untrustworthy.
Or maybe I am merely to put up with being human, which means I’m often of two minds, a different person to different people, including myself, both crabby and angelic, forgetting all nouns and a walking encyclopedia. I’m like all of us, doing the best I can. That was my mantra one year – ‘we’re all doing the best we can.’ Someone said to me, “No, that can’t be. If you’re killing someone, you’re not doing the best you can.”
I said, “If that person could do better, he wouldn’t be killing someone.”
She didn’t go along with me, but that’s okay, too. How many people do we really agree with anyway?
This isn’t a cheery column for right before Christmas, but not everyone is in favor of the phony cheer of the lengthy holiday anyway. I have a friend who dislikes Christmas so much she has a fit at the music coming out of gasoline pumps, the constant demand to shop for presents, and the general holly-jolly of the days between Back Friday and Christmas Eve with people wishing her Happy Christmas. She’s not an unhappy person and rejects the notion that people are grinning at her to cheer up. She is merely a contrarian who’s willing to admit what she loathes.
Merry Christmas from me, anyway, truly – as well as Happy Holidays and Feliz Navidad and Mele Kalikimaka. As long as my life goes on, I think I’m best off with tra la, tra la rather than bah humbug. But complaining now and then, especially at Christmastime, makes life tolerable.
